Alienation by Rahel Jaeggi

Author:Rahel Jaeggi [Jaeggi, Rahel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI027000, PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Deconstruction, PHI019000, PHILOSOPHY / Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

8

“AS IF THROUGH A WALL OF GLASS”: INDIFFERENCE AND SELF-ALIENATION

I, say I. Unbelieving.

—SAMUEL BECKETT, THE UNNAMABLE

THIS CHAPTER IS ABOUT INDIFFERENCE as a kind of self-alienation and loss of self—hence about phenomena of alienation in which one perceives the entire world as alien and indifferent, in which one loses one’s relation to the world and “withdraws one’s feelers” from it. To what extent, though, is indifference alienation, if the capacity to distance oneself from certain involvements in the world can also be understood as freedom? At issue here is the relation between self and world as well as the thesis that it is not possible to understand self-realization outside a successful relation to the world. Again, I organize my discussion around (1) an example that I then (2) interpret with an eye to the concept of self-alienation. In doing so I (3) distinguish two aspects of alienation: detachment from one’s practical involvement in the world and the loss of identification. Then, with the help of ideas from Harry Frankfurt and Hegel, I (4) elaborate the problem of indifference—the ambivalence between freedom and loss of self—in order, finally, (5) to be able to determine the relation between freedom, indifference, and alienation.

(1) THE INDIFFERENT MAN

The character of Perlmann in Pascal Mercier’s novel Perlmann’s Silence illustrates a case of self-alienation as indifference. Perlmann is a once ambitious and still generally respected professor of linguistics, who—in Mercier’s description—has “lost his faith in the importance of academic work” and who ever since looks “upon academic work as if through a wall of glass.”1 The previously ambitious academic now reacts with indifference to critiques of his work. As if under “a local anesthetic,”2 he experiences the positions he once defended as though they were no longer his; his identification with them has dissolved. This condition of complete indifference, not only to his discipline but also to the entire way of life bound up with it, at first sets in for him almost unnoticed and without apparent reason. It is not, for instance, because his interest in linguistics has been replaced by other beliefs or passions. Nor is the distance that becomes increasingly noticeable during the three-week conference he has organized due to a critical view he has of the factory-like nature of contemporary academia. Perlmann is not a rebel. The opposite seems rather to be the case: once he has distanced himself, everything that was meaningful to him before appears as mere busywork. The world as a whole has submerged—without apparent cause—into the haze of indifference and become unreal. The projects he previously participated in with interest have suddenly receded into a distant region. It is not only, though, that the world becomes alien to him; in this condition he also becomes alien to himself. One has the impression that with the fading of the world Perlmann himself becomes diffuse and unreal; having become a “man without opinions,” his own identity becomes strangely ephemeral.

(2) DEMARCATING THE PHENOMENON AND DEFINING ITS CHARACTERISTICS

Several features of this example suggest that Perlmann’s situation can be understood as a case of self-alienation.

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